WarEffects aims to advance a systematic, nuanced, and rigorous understanding of how civil wars affect women’s social and political empowerment at the local level. Recent quantitative research suggests that civil wars promote women’s political representation, but these accounts reflect country-level aggregate measures and often focus on a minority of political ‘elite’ women. Thus, they do not inform us how subnational and individual-level variation in civil war experiences affect the majority of ‘non-elite’ women at the local level. To address this challenge, I propose a novel theoretical framework that simultaneously explores the effects of civil wars on i) multiple dimensions of women’s empowerment in the household and family, the community, and local politics. Moreover, I introduce ii) nuanced definitions for different types of exposure to civil wars, iii) the difference between changes in gender roles and gender attitudes, and iv) the moderating effect of context conditions. Building on the variation of each of these four dimensions allows me to generate a large set of hypotheses to advance a systematic and nuanced understanding of when, why, and how civil wars promote women’s empowerment, and when they do not. To empirically explore these hypotheses, I will combine novel quantitative survey experiments and qualitative research in Colombia, DR Congo, and Sri Lanka. While each country case has experienced several decades of civil war, there is significant within-case and between-case variation in social context, conflict dimensions, patterns of violence, and conflict status, rendering them ideal for exploring the local effects of civil war violence on women’s empowerment. Drawing on this comparative design will allow me to make statements about common patterns, divergences, and conditional effects. Altogether, this wealth of findings will establish a new conceptual and empirical research platform on the impact of civil wars on gender relations.

More than two decades of intense radical religion research since 9/11 has brought attention to radicalisation, violence, and radical beliefs, and a strong emphasis on Islam in the contemporary era. Yet, radical religion is as burning an issue for societies today as ever, and individuals persist in staying committed. Strong, individual commitment shapes any form of radical religion, but it is rarely studied empirically, let alone historically. RADHEART ambitiously proposes to analyse how strong individual commitment is expressed and cultivated in ancient forms of Judaism and Christianity. Strong, religious commitment is approached as radical habits of the heart, i.e. emic models of the self’s felt experience of strong commitment. With an innovative theoretical framework that combines the aesthetics of religion and experience-oriented anthropology, RADHEART focuses on how an emotionally intense, strong religious commitment is expressed in and cultivated by ancient media. RADHEART offers high-gain insights by 1) comparing radical habits of the heart across the two ancient religions that were most seminal for later formations, 2) reframing the study of radical ancient religion by tackling the pervasive vocabulary of interior organs and the body in ancient poetry and narratives about strong commitment, and 3) instead of focusing on beliefs, terms, and conceptual reflections, RADHEART scrutinises the roles of the embodied self and emotionality in radical religion. Research has focused on the collective character of ancient religions, disregarding the crucial role of individual strong commitment and it has seen ancient emotions as lacking in affectivity. RADHEART breaks with these trends and enquires into strong, individual religious commitment in two media forms: poetry and narrative. RADHEART asks how they express and model strong commitment and how they affect their audiences across the axes of textuality, mediality, and practice.

Cold spells, heatwaves and droughts have severe socio-economic impacts and are related to a peculiar phenomenon known as ‘atmospheric blocking’. Accurate and timely prediction of blocking frequency and strength is therefore of enormous importance. However, despite decades of research, climate models still exhibit substantial errors in blocking, leading to large uncertainties in seasonal-to-decadal predictions and future projections of blocking trends. At the root of this is the lack of a fundamental theory for blocking and an appropriate metric to identify blocks. A recent theoretical breakthrough offers an exciting path forward by drawing an analogy between blocking in the atmosphere to traffic jams on a highway. The traffic jam – blocking theory, which is based on the conservation properties of large-amplitude nonlinear waves, has led to a conceptual simplification of why blocks occur. Leveraging the promise shown by this new theory, ATM BLOCKING will provide the first-ever assessment of the key dynamical drivers of blocking errors and trends in the state-of-the-art global climate models. The success of ATM BLOCKING will offer a new theoretical basis for evaluating the performance of climate models in simulating blocks, with an unprecedented ability to pinpoint the responsible atmospheric processes across timescales. Down the road, these results will help policy makers and stakeholders to prepare for risks associated with climate change and weather extremes. The project proposes to address the problem using a combination of theory, numerical modeling and statistical analysis at University of Bergen, Norway in close collaboration with the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research under the supervision of leading experts in climate dynamics, climate modeling and weather extremes. In addition, the researcher’s own expertise in the theory of blocking will ensure the success of the project while facilitating two-way knowledge transfer between the researcher and the host.

Parameterized Complexity (PC) provides an approach to moving beyond classic worst-case analysis of algorithms by focusing on multivariate algorithms whose performance is influenced by several parameters beyond input size. While it has been successful in various algorithmic domains, particularly those involving discrete objects like graphs, sets, matroids, or Boolean formulas, PC remains underutilized in areas involving geometric and algebraic objects such as points, vectors, linear spaces, or matrices. This project seeks to revolutionize the PC field by developing novel multivariate algorithms for continuous optimization problems involving such objects. The performance of these algorithms—whether measured by approximation ratio, probability error, or running time—is highly sensitive to multiple parameters. The main challenge in advancing parameterized complexity to these new domains is the need for suitable algorithmic and complexity tools. To address this challenge, the NewPC project proposes to revisit and revise fundamental methods for handling geometric and algebraic objects—such as dimension reduction, sampling, sketching, clustering, and coresets—through the conceptual questions of PC, including determining proper parameterization, quantifying the distance from triviality, and identifying when kernelization is possible. In short, the proposed Research Program can be summarized as: Questions of PC + Geometric Methods = New Horizons The proposed research will open new horizons in parameterized complexity by - Advancing multivariate approximation and lossy kernelization, both emerging areas within parameterized complexity. - Establishing multivariate algorithmic analysis as the standard tool for designing provably correct and efficient algorithms in domains such as computational geometry, machine learning, robust statistics, and optimization—areas where the classical worst-case algorithmic analysis often falls short.

In mammalian cells, N-terminal (Nt) acetylation is one of the most abundant protein modifications. It is catalysed by N-terminal acetyltransferases (NATs) and mostly occurs co-translationally. However, in contrast to the defined co-translational NATs, post-translational NATs which have crucial regulatory roles are mostly unexplored. Distinct peptide hormones regulate appetite, metabolism, sexual behaviour and pain, and their biological activity is critically modulated by post-translational Nt-acetylation. However, the identity of the NAT responsible for this modification, ‘HormNat’, is unknown, thus the molecular and physiological ramifications of this regulatory circuit remain elusive. Another example is actin, a key regulator of cell motility and cell division. The actin N-terminus is crucial for actin function and in mammals actin is modified by an unknown post-translational NAT, ‘ActNat’. Hence, the objectives of this project are to identify these human NATs acting post-translationally, and to investigate their molecular mechanisms, regulation and impact. We will identify the novel NATs by a combination of classical and newly developed in-house tools like in vitro acetylation assays, unique bisubstrate analogues, Nt-acetylation specific antibodies, and targeted mass spectrometry. Interestingly, Nt-acetylation is considered irreversible, but there is reason to believe that specific substrates are Nt-deacetylated. Elucidation of post-translational NATs and the reversible nature of Nt-acetylation would represent a new era in the field of protein and peptide regulation and identify key cellular and organismal switches.